How to Read Clefs in Music

Series Summary

Music creates a connection between people that is not limited by time, distance, or relationship. A song can speak to anyone, anywhere. That’s why music continually changes and grows, is still loved and still proliferates. Music is a living language. Sheet music is an important tool for preserving accurately the musical information laid down by an artist 5, 50, or 500 years ago. This system of communication, this language, allows musicians to recreate, and thus re-experience, a musical message sent by an artist or composer generations before. There is such an amazing wealth of orchestral sheet music to draw from that it is a respected tradition for students to begin their studies there. In learning from Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, a player learns the fundamentals of the instrument as well. In these free music instruction videos, learn how to read sheet music scores for piano and other musical instruments. Our expert will give you tips on how interpret clefs, time signatures, key signatures, tempo and mood markings, accidentals, rests, repeats and more. Also learn techniques for staying in rhythm, playing the right notes at the right time, and marking your score.

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Katie and I’m here on behalf of expertvillage.com to talk about being aware of clefs. So the very first thing to be aware of when you’re about to read a piece of music are clefs and here we’re looking at a piece of piano music where we see both the treble clef and the bass clef. The bass clef contains lower notes so the lower you are on this staff, that’s what these lines are called, the lower the note, as you go higher the notes get higher, so you can see notes on the bass clef are lower notes and notes on the treble clef are higher notes. Here you see a single line of music written in the bass clef, it’s important to notice that this is the bass clef and not the treble clef because the actual name of the note will be different depending on where it is on the bass clef vs. the treble clef. So for example this very top space note on a bass clef is a G, if this were a treble clef instead this note would be an E, so you have to know what clef you are in to know what note you’re seeing. Also the bass clef and the treble clef are related because they show where these notes are situated for example on a keyboard, so here in the bass clef this is a G, on a treble clef this is the exact same note this is the exact same G but you see that where the G is very high up on the bass clef, it’s very low on the treble clef because it’s a spectrum going up and that’s why clefs are important."